BASIC Computer Language Turns 40

5 REM nam37 codes
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END

Comments

School Janitors

[FlatBlack]

Ooo. Me Grandpa was a custodian and a very smart man. Watch your mouth. I work for a school and the janitors here are smart folks too. Most of all, they treat the lowly tech guy with respect in spite of his job and the fact that he lives in his parents basement and has never touched a girl (not a real girl anyway).

And then came VB

[John Starks]

Then VB came, and a language was created that was muscular enough to script Word macro viruses, but simple enough to enfuriate good programmers (I mean, really, no short circuit boolean operators? It makes me weep.)

The old days were better for beginners.

[Theovon]

Computers died for me the day the stopped shipping them with built-in BASIC.

Seriously, though. The computers of the 80's were great for learning programming on. Not that BASIC is a good teaching language, but it was accessible and simple.

Modern computers have too many features that you want serious programmers to have access to (complicating languages), and modern languages have all sorts of safety, structure, and OO features that are great for serious programmers but also complicate things for beginners.

Breaking into programming is much harder than it used to be.

In defence of BASIC

[BlightThePower]

Yes, BASIC fosters bad programming habits. However, this isn't really the point. Let me explain why.

1. When I and many other people started out with computers, BASIC was the only game in town. Yes, there was assembler and other languages, but its easy to forget these days that information was hard to come by pre-web and indeed, for children who don't have the disposable income for specialist magazine subscriptions. Libraries typically had a couple of computer books, but these would be non-specific description books (that no longer exist as genre really) explaining that a computer had ROM, RAM and you could hook it up to a printer and a VDU! etc. etc. They had hand-drawn "screenshots" of space invaders and pac-man. BASIC was easy enough that we could get started without being put off. On Slashdot its easy to be intellectually macho, but theres a lot to be said for a low learning curve that encouraged you ever onward.

2. BASIC today. Well, its probably not for serious programmers. However, what is often forgotten here is that not everyone who programs is a professional programmer. Or wants to be. For very simple programs, GOTO is no sin. At least when the alternative is no program at all and, say, organising data in a text file by hand or "manually" in Excel or something. Bad habits are not a problem here, because one is never going to go on to have to write mission critical software in C or whatever. I know there are modern scripting languages that are perhaps just as easy to use, but you might be surprised how many people you might have thought have difficulty programming a VCR will break out QBASIC or VB when they need 20 line quicky knocking together and the programmers are "busy until further notice". Its easy to belittle this from a position of knowledge and authority, but relatively speaking these people are your friends in a landscape of PHBs that think programs just happen.

So in conclusion, BASIC is often better than nothing. That might sound like feint praise, but like I say, for the non-specialist that can be quite a valuable thing. Computer programming for the masses. Mock it at your peril.

Re:Dijkstra said it best ...

[poot_rootbeer]

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Professor Edsger Dijkstra

Okay, now all the professional coders whose first programming experience was in BASIC on a VIC-20, Apple II, or TRS-80, raise your hands... man, there seems to be a lot of us, huh.

Oh yeah and "Goto considered harmful" too, of course.

GOTO is essential -- all processors use it at their lowest levels (it goes by the name JMP in assembly language, though.)

All other types of branching or looping are just syntactic sugar.

Before we dismiss BASIC as a simple language

[alphakappa]

That is its biggest strength.

I remember how I got into programming in school - we had these BBC computers which could run BASIC. The language was simple enough for me to understand and intuitive enough for me to actually like programming. (Before that I had seen an aunt learn COBOL and the very look of the language frightened me)

Sure, BASIC is not as advanced as C, BASIC uses GOTO statements, BASIC (not QBASIC though) uses archaic line numbers (but still not as archaic as the Fortran 77 tradition of having to write everything after 7 spaces), but BASIC is the best tool to introduce an enthusiastic person to the world of programming. See this example: In BASIC you would show the person:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 END

Bingo, the person magically sees his first program work. Try the same thing with C:
#include
int main(){
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}

See how much more you have to explain? Ever tried to explain stdio.h and int main to someone? :-) Once you introduce a kid to the concepts of do loops, for loops and if..then statements, it is so much easier to learn a complicated language like C. It's a pity you don't have QBASIC shipping with Windows machines any more. Vbscripting is not at the same intuitive level.